More on religion and political candidacies

Sandy Levinson

I was going to post the following remarks in the "comments" section of my previous post on former Senator Santorum, but I strongly suspect that the reversion of the discussion to irrelevant attacks on President Obama and insulting remarks about one of the participants means that no one would read them. So I offer this new posting:

Let me suggest that reference to the JFK speech (or, for that matter, to Article VI's "no religious test oath clause") is quite irrelevant if candidates themselves place their religious views front and center about "who they are" and, indeed, what should be expected of them if they take political office. After all, some very serious Catholics, at home and abroad, have suggested the legitimacy of civil disobedience rather than obey immoral laws. Unless one takes the untenable position that all laws deserve obedience, then, inevitably, one will find oneself sypathetic with some of these calls for civil disobedience. Think in the American context of the Berrigan brothers or, for that matter, and far more recently the views of the arch-conservative Cardinal Mahoney in Los Angeles who suggested that there might be a moral duty to provide sanctuary to illegal aliens. At the same time, of course, one might be very much against other such calls, such as the suggestion several years ago by some Vatican officials that Spanish bureaucrats simply refused to obey a new law passed in that country legalizing same-sex marriage.

John Kennedy was by no stretch of the imagination a "serious Cathoolic" in the sense of being interested in Catholic theology or how its tenets might require shaping his own life. If we had the same category for Catholics as we do for Jews, I suspect that Kennedy might well have been classified as a "secular Catholic," in the way that there is no evidence that, say, Justice Ginsburg is anything other than a "secular Jew." (This is not meant as a knock on Ginsburg, since I certainly consider myself a "secular--and decidedly non-Halachic or, for that matter, believing--Jew.)" Justice Scalia, on the other hand, gave a very serious speech on how he would feel compelled to resign from the Court if he believed (which he does not) that the Church had made a definitive judgment on the (im)morality of capital punishment, in the way that it has on abortion, given his view that the Constitution, correctly interpreted, clearly accepts the constitutionality of capital punishment. I discuss the general issue of "Catholic justices" in two different essays in my book Wrestling With Diversity, as well as in a symposium several years ago published by the St. Thomas Law Review addressing the significance of the fact that a majority of the Supreme Court is now Catholic. (Needless to say, only a Catholic law school would or could have sponsored such a symposium, which was excellent, since it would otherwise be viewed as "anti-Catholic" to address the possibility that one's identity as a committed Catholic might even be minimally relevant to one's conception of judging or constitutional meaning.)
Posted 6:11 PM by Sandy Levinson [link]